


nights taste like gold

by agonies (Hyb)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Dance Magic Dance, First Time, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, University Setting, a dash of the magicians and a heaping spoonful of fma, crimes of fondness, we get by with a little help from our friends, wonwoo's brain rambles free of charge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23877025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: In the hush he imagines he can feel the resonance of the earth and the stars, the golden feeling of casting that reverberates in his molars, up his spine. His cells are humming in time with Soonyoung's cells, his electricity is reaching out and somewhere there is Wonwoo, and they are all made of the same stardust.That's how it felt when I met you,he should have said a long time ago, but it would be stupid now.
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Lee Chan | Dino
Comments: 28
Kudos: 119





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [super](https://archiveofourown.org/users/super/gifts).



Every spell has a starting point. It couldn't begin anywhere else, or it would take on the shape of a different spell altogether. 

_Don't you wish people had these,_ he asked once, the end of his pencil tapping the origin of the array. Wonwoo had considered the textbook from over his shoulder. 

After a thoughtful silence Wonwoo said, _maybe they do. Maybe we haven't found them yet._

The day after practicals everyone sleeps late. At least Chan assumes it’s the same for everyone, regardless of their major. He only talks to dancers, anymore — dancers and Wonwoo. The caster dormitory sizzles with hot summer stillness when he drifts awake at half past ten. There’s something of a dream lingering like an aftertaste on the back of his tongue. Soft edges and warm skin, maybe, but it’s already fading.

He reaches to chuck a pillow across the room out of habit, because the alternative is a startled good morning kick to the gut, then reconsiders. Easing up, he finds the floor under his bare feet and rolls his creaky shoulders. Spends a moment on his right, probing the soreness.

There’s an inch of water left in the cup by his bed. He dips a finger in, grins for nobody and for everything. On the wall over his headboard he draws a succinct array, pausing twice to wet his finger again. He has to work quickly. When the lines begin to dry the array will be useless. It’s novice stuff that seems lazy now, but before he transferred he would have needed six and a half minutes of rigid concentration to get his lines right. Wonwoo would keep time, breath soft against his ear when he leaned in to murmur a correction. He presses his thumb to the key point and concentrates.

A siren like a goose being lovingly strangled wails through the room.

Soonyoung bolts upright just as someone groans and pounds the wall from the next room. Minghao, probably. Jun could sleep through an earthquake if he wasn’t missing free food.

Unlike Soonyoung, who’s glaring as much as his eyes puffy with exhaustion and allergies will allow. He makes a noise somewhere deep in his throat that rises three dangerous octaves in outrage. His hair, silvery pale from his latest experiment, is fluffy on one side of his head and plastered flat to the other.

“No practice,” he grins before Soonyoung can work up the coordination to pounce and yowl in his ear.

He stops rubbing his nose and blinks. Blinks again. “Term’s over?” he mumbles uncertainly.

Sore as he is, he feels like he could throw Soonyoung over his shoulder and run laps around the building. “Yeah.” He doesn’t realize just how hard he’s beaming until his face begins to ache.

A beat of slow comprehension and Soonyoung whoops. He falls back on his bed and tries to pump his fists in the air only to groan and knead his bicep instead. Minghao pounds the wall again.

  
  
  


After lunch they all clean the dorm. Junhui whisks up the dust and debris from the halls with a breezy array, shooing it down the stairs to the foyer for the sweepers. Chan joins Soonyoung scrubbing the baseboards, shirts hitched up behind their necks because even the open windows can’t cut the July heat, but no one wants a last gasp dress code demerit from a monitor either. Scrubbing is more finicky than sweeping, and if the varnish peels they’ll be in for it, so Soonyoung chalks an array on the bucket to keep the water warm. The slope of his neck is more relaxed than Chan has seen in a month.

Sometimes their arms bump over the bucket, never too hard. It’s easy to move around each other, even if once it was so challenging Chan felt a miserable knot beneath his sternum. They’ve slept on the floor of the studio together or curled up like pill bugs in Chan’s bed away from the window when they were too tired to concentrate on warming arrays for the room in the meanest bit of winter. He’s never embarrassed by his body or Soonyoung’s, not anymore.

“Do you need the room tonight?” Soonyoung asks lightly. He waits for the rest of the question to fall into place but there’s nothing. Maybe Soonyoung is picking up some thread of conversation he lost, shuffled between pages cramming for history and pyromancy. 

“Why?”

Now Soonyoung glances up, surprised. He stares a little too long and his nose scrunches up like when he’s confronted with thorny trigonometry. “Nothing, my bad. Get some clean water, will you?”

He carries the bucket away from his body, trying not to smudge Soonyoung’s array. But water sloshes over the rim when he hitches a step backward, squinting out the open window into the sun. 

Wonwoo is outside where the grass is so green it shocks the eyes. He’s easy to spot in his favorite blue shirt, bright like paint straight from the tube. Long sleeves, in this weather, but that isn’t even a surprise. He’s got a folding table under each arm, propped against the grass as he talks to Hyejin. His head snaps up when Chan cups a hand around his mouth and barks his name.

“Are you coming tonight?” he hollers down. He's shading his glasses and staring up at him blankly, mouth slack, so he yells again louder. Hyejin turns back from her clipboard and follows Wonwoo's eyes up to the window. She laughs, the shape of her mouth obvious even if he can’t hear her. She mimes bouncing one of her breasts through her blouse. He's still wearing his shirt pulled back behind his head and tight over his shoulders, he realizes. But almost everyone is inside, even Yongsun when she darted up from the girls floor looking for a stepladder. It's not like Wonwoo of all people would care. 

Chan sticks his tongue out and she blows a kiss back at him. 

He points at the sun impatiently, drags his arm downward to indicate its setting, and sketches the universal open-palmed gesture for _so?_

Wonwoo nods once and doesn’t try to yell, because of course he doesn’t. Wonwoo can be so quiet, if he laid down on the floor of the library the books would accept him into their herd and he’d have a litter of peer reviewed journals before the new year.

The tight look on his face is probably just the sun, but he can't help lingering anyway, drumming his fingers uncertainly along the window frame. Then Wonwoo flashes a reassuring grin with all his teeth and it’s good, it’s great. This. Everything.

Soap bubbles float up and catch the light pink and silvery blue when he and Soonyoung bend to work again. He hums unevenly along to Minghao’s record and he can’t remember if he’s felt this grateful in all his life. To be here, only here, exactly himself. By accident and by design. He wants to sprint down the stairs and out the open doors and catch up to Wonwoo, tackle him to the grass and make him understand. To sing _you, you, every day of this I owe you._

  
  
  


The semester is over and the rising moon is full. At dusk the air is settles sticky warm and heavy. No monitors or professors hurry out to break up the clusters of students on blankets on the east lawn, drinking forbidden beer from plastic cups. 

In the hush he imagines he can feel the resonance of the earth and the stars, the golden feeling of casting that reverberates in his molars, up his spine. His cells are humming in time with Soonyoung's cells, his vital electricity is reaching out and somewhere there is Wonwoo, and they are all made of the same stardust. _That's how it felt when I met you,_ he should have said a long time ago, but it would sound stupid now. 

He and Soonyoung linger under an old tree where the air is coolest, grasping each other by the shoulder for balance as they stretch out their hamstrings. They don’t talk. They don’t do much of that anymore, before they dance. For so long he was stumbling to catch up, it felt like holding his breath for two years. Lately, though. They’re so close to perfect he can lick the taste off the backs of his teeth. They don’t have to tell each other what to do. They know.

And Soonyoung has a vision. He always does.

  
  
  


The lash of freezing winter rain feels personal. It’s a useless, self-pitying thought, but Wonwoo watches the landscape blur past hazed in grey and indulges. The trip is an hour and a half by train. More than enough time to chew the inside of his cheek raw and worry. 

But in the city the sky is clear, hard flat sunlight in the cold. The shadows huddle close to the buildings on campus. 

First he tries the administration office. They send him to a dorm and a door that never opens for his knock, the echo hollow. Then he tries the library, but the study carrels are already so packed on a Saturday morning that he gives up after half an hour. All the walking is steaming him up under his winter coat, a flush creeping up the back of his neck. He finds himself rubbing his single pendant between his thumb and forefinger. 

He tries the dorm again and asks a boy leaving the main entrance if he knows where a person could find Lee Chan. He doesn’t, but another guy blowing in from the cold falters. He has Wonwoo repeat himself and tugs a violently multicolored knit cap from over his ears to hear better. He nods decisively. His directions are very specific, with his forefingers and thumbs acting like a viewfinder. Even chafed to a flush by the chill he's polite enough to ask Wonwoo if he'd like some help getting there, but he avoids the offer. Better if he goes alone.

Here is the old medical school, with stones scorched by spells from the war under the climbing ivy. Here is the massive tree with a trunk Wonwoo would need three of himself to circle. The branches spread wide, sturdy. In the roots he finds a coat and an overstuffed backpack and two empty cans of strawberry milk, and in the cradle of the boughs like an open palm there is a boy reading with a pencil caught between his teeth.

“Hey,” he calls up as calm and clear as he can, because all at once his certainty is rushing out like he’s been shot through with holes. This is a very real person swinging down, easy, with one arm while the other holds his textbook and his notes. He lands lightly on his feet. He has clear, bright eyes, polished by the sun. 

“Sorry, do I know you?” Polite, nakedly curious. He looks more grown up than in his footage, somehow. There’s something in the straight steady line of his shoulders. His sweater looks too thin for the cold.

“No, you don’t.” He had all his points in order on the train, shuffled into place like flashcards. “Jeon Wonwoo,” he offers lamely. “Someone told me where to find you.”

The corners of his mouth curl up first when he begins to smile, catlike. Wonwoo has a horrible certainty that what he’s feeling is _charmed._ He didn't think to allow for that in his preparations. “You were looking for me? Don't tell me you're selling something.” There’s a warm sound to it, teasing. A plucked string of recognition like spotting an old friend in a crowd. 

“Would you have a minute to talk?” It comes out overly formal, scripted and very much like a salesman now that he hears himself. Lee Chan’s tentative grin is widening and he has the dizzy sense that he’s missed a step in the stairs along his way, jolting through empty air. He should have eaten breakfast.

Bright, sharp Lee Chan goes sharper yet when he explains that he just got off the train from Wonju.

“I applied for a transfer there,” he says slowly, searching. The chill has brought a blood flush to his cheeks, his mouth. Wonwoo wants to ask him to please put his coat on now. “Did the school send you? I didn’t make it, I got the letter.”

“There are never nearly enough spots,” Wonwoo agrees, and tamps down the urge to apologize for what, nothing. That Lee Chan might ever be disappointed, which is none of his business. “Aren’t you cold? I’m cold just looking at you.”

He laughs, throaty, and Wonwoo’s thoughts scatter like hail. “I’m like, begging you to get to a point. Or is there a prize if I can guess why you’re here?”

“Bear with me,” he winces. “It’s worth it, I think.”

“I’m going to think about my prize, and you won’t even know what it’s going to be,” he declares with a long-suffering sigh, but he can’t make himself frown. His eyes give him away. He permits Wonwoo to herd him toward the dining hall. He’s carrying his coat slung over his arm instead of wearing it and the back of his neck is vulnerable and sleek.

“You were willing to repeat a year,” Wonwoo considers along the way. “With all that work, are you sure?”

“I don’t mind the work,” he shrugs. Economical but expressive. Soonyoung shrugs like that. “I’m a year ahead of schedule, really. Call it borrowed time.”

“I noticed.” Lee Chan is eighteen. His birthday is three weeks away. He remembers this. “How is that?”

“My family did some circus work when I was little. We traveled, and home schooling goes fast.”

“The circus?”

“Tumbling, you know. My parents were acrobats. They have a dance studio now," he adds quickly. "I had real lessons, nine years worth."

“That must have been an amazing place to grow up,” he offers, and means it. His dad sleeps at the office when his experiments are in delicate phases and his stepmom could be in the next room all day and never say a word to him. He thinks a person could love the light and the noise.

“Yeah,” Chan brightens, but his eyes are tighter than they were before. “It really was.”

Once they stake out a place at the window in the searing white light, Chan pushes a steaming paper cup of coffee across the table. With graceful indifference he wraps Wonwoo’s hands around it and then covers them with his own. For a moment his tongue is fastened to the roof of his mouth and he can't find the words.

“I talked to our advisors about all the transfer candidates, so I’ve seen the footage you submitted,” he confesses. He finds he can’t look away from their hands. Chan’s are cold, but they warm up fast. He considers how rarely you remember it. The first time you touch another person, or they touch you. The very first. “I could see your training just fine. Why didn’t you apply to the program out of high school?”

“Made a deal with my parents.” He catches the tail end of a grimace. “They didn’t want me casting, not like that. There was — an accident. The circus had a pair of sisters who cast together. When I was a kid we’d all get real quiet and watch them even if it meant missing the last of the cotton candy before the cart got packed up. I know I’m supposed to say I take casting seriously and I only applied to the program for substantial academic reasons and that I wouldn't waste it on performing or whatever but if you could’ve seen them," he trails off gazing into the middle distance. "I still dream about their shows.”

“But there was an accident,” he repeats slowly.

“Yeah.” Chan squints out the window into the light. He withdraws his hands. “A fire. They died. Other people, too.”

In a civilized world Wonwoo would know what to say to that. He nearly quotes something about solace, but kicks the pretentious impulse in time. “The deal with your parents?”

“I said I’d keep my math and science grades up and get into a different program. My sister is studying to be an apothecary, something like that. And they said I could try and transfer second year, if I did well enough in my classes. But transferring makes you look flaky, right? Not first choice material. Drink your coffee, it’s going to get cold and then you’ll never thaw out.”

“You were outside longer,” he objects, offended. “You ought to be drinking it.”

“And I’m not the one whining about the cold.” A little too warm again, too fond for someone who just met him and has listened to him ramble with unfathomable patience. He’s perfect, Wonwoo thinks, which is the point of this exercise and yet somehow sinks like a stone in his gut. The coffee is too hot, as it happens, and it burns his tongue.

“Sunbae,” he presses, something complicated playing out across his face so quickly that Wonwoo can’t decipher all the shades of meaning. Hopeful, that's one. “Are you — did you come here to ask me to be your partner?”

He thinks often about the before and after of things. Potential energy. Transformation. He thinks of it now.

“No,” he swallows. There’s an old poem, about a man who snared himself in his casting and didn’t know, and when he opened his mouth blackbirds poured out until there was nothing of him left. “I’m asking you for someone else.”

“Oh.” His grave straight brows draw together. “Somebody who isn’t here?”

“Kwon Soonyoung,” he nods. He fumbles through his bag, fingers gone clumsy with the lingering cold. He lays down his tablet like an offering. “He doesn’t know I’m here. He’s not, ah. He’s not exactly speaking to me right now.”

Chan scoffs very softly, amazed. “If you're his — wouldn’t you two share a room?”

“Imagine practice,” Wonwoo sighs into his coffee. “He’s right to be upset with me.”

“Because you don’t want to be his partner anymore? Why is that?” 

“I’m shifting my focus to theory.”

Chan has dimmed, as if unsure what to make of him now, but that tugs out another hint of a smile. That feline turn at the corner, it must always give him away. “Isn’t theory just what they call it when you aren’t allowed to talk about what you’re studying?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say.” He does something very stupid. He thinks he’s allowed a few stupid moments, maybe, for as often as he’s careful, and does precisely what’s expected of him. Just a few. He reaches out and covers this boy’s hands with his own, engulfs them, and tries to be as true as he’s ever been with anyone in his life. 

“Soonyoung is better than me,” he says. “Not just technically, our marks are fine. But I’ve worked with him every day for almost two years and I know he’s better. He’s _inspired._ I watch him and I know I’m in the wrong field because I enjoy the math and the precision and getting the job done, but I’m not in love with it and I never will be. This is what he was meant to be doing, and I owe him for showing me that I’m, not. Meant for it. 

“And I went and met four other people who were on the transfer list before you,” he squeezes his hands. There’s nothing in Chan’s face he can read. _Couldn’t you have taught me how to be this solemn little oracle when I was eighteen, to be so steady. Could you have taught me to smile more, too._ “I talked to them all and I studied their work so I could say for certain that it’s not just my gut — it has to be you. Soonyoung will see that, when he meets you, because you’re like him. I need to make things right for him, you understand?”

Chan is quiet, and he catches his tongue between his teeth to give him this. Time to consider. It's the very least he can do.

“I wasn’t accepted,” he frowns at last. 

“I asked on Soonyoung’s behalf. You wouldn’t be a traditional first year, you would need to work ahead. It would be a tremendous amount of work to put yourself through. But would you consider it if I could help you? I’ll come up on the weekends and get you grounded in theory for next term, I could meet you at home over break if you wanted, I’ll keep studying with you when you transfer. He’s worth it. So are you.”

The little oracle is gone and Chan is pink all over. “Oh my god, please don’t cry.”

“I am not,” Wonwoo sniffs and unclasps their hands. He thumbs open his tablet and breathes. “Do you want to see Soonyoung?” He scrolls to their geomancy practical, hovers over the video.

Chan meets his eyes instead, and holds them for a very long time. "You don't even know me."

He smiles tightly. "I'm a quick study."

“Well. I'd feel bad if you wasted a trip,” he says, thready with disbelief. “Show me.”

Memory is an imperfect machine, Wonwoo knows. The brain is better designed to imagine than to faithfully record. The sun was hard and bright as the edge of a knife, but he can’t be sure it hung in Chan’s dark hair like a wreath of stars. Remembering is like this, always stretched into new shapes, colored by sentiment.

The stars come later, when he's made himself still and forgettable like a coat rack in a corner of the live practice room where the dancers are permitted to activate their elaborate arrays and the ceiling bristles with silvery spouts for fire suppression foam. When Chan and Soonyoung sweep up the light into spinning bands like an astrolabe and it burns bright in Chan's eyes, in his hair, cold sparks skittering over his skin before the pair of them flow and contort and draw the light inward. Smaller and smaller until it hums between their outstretched hands like a gold coin. Wonwoo has done this much himself. He has never felt this.

He thinks of potential energy, of moments when what will happen hasn’t, and so all things are infinite and possible. He considers the great eras of discovery, of alchemists and astronomers. The earliest casting in unstable arrays, solitary magicians without partners to stabilize them, and the last breath of fear and wonder before they activated their designs. The blink before grace or annihilation.

  
  
  


When he meets Soonyoung, he feels like he should apologize. For his gnawed over cuticles, the stress spots on his chin, for letting his hair get so scruffy even though Wonwoo says it’s fine. He wasn't expecting him yet. He wants to inspire confidence. A nauseous realization clobbers him, that he's been taking Wonwoo's assurances for granted. Soonyoung could still say no.

Then he asks Chan how long he danced, and he asks how it made him feel. And Chan says, in a way that only makes sense as the words tumble out in their own order, feeling like he’s boiling in his flush, that it’s the only time he feels like he knows what he’s meant to be doing (and this is true). That he was never the best (and this is true, too) but when all the steps and angles resolve themselves and click into place like some new forged thing. Well, if anything else could make him feel like that, he’d do it. He would build boats or herd sheep or count every star and learn its name and what it has to say about the order of the universe. Anything.

“I hate letting him be right,” Soonyoung sighs, and elbows Wonwoo hovering anxiously in his periphery. “Go away, I want to show him our midterm routine. You want to start practicing over break, right?” And Chan does. God, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from waking up slow by gabrielle alpin
> 
> > for robin, in curse and thanks
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)


	2. Chapter 2

_Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.  
_ _Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion._

_Even so, something sings in these fugitive words.  
_ _Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth.  
_ _Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy._

The windows are all dark and the east lawn rolls lazily from the fringe of campus out to the glassy lake. When the breeze shifts he can see the distant blue crackle of the campus wards in the empty air, the ones renewed every morning at the lion pillars standing sentinel over the university.

It all feels alien, even though he’s called this home for two years. An hour and a half by train is all it would take to knock at the door of his old room, or to stand under the tree that would be alive with summer now, the one where Wonwoo reached into the notes and meter of his life and changed the song. It feels farther than that somehow, like past the edge of the lake and Jun’s contented humming the world drops away into nothingness. The nights are so quiet out here, with the mountains at their backs, and the stars are dense. Chalk dust is like that, in a bright studio. It hangs in the air like a million fiery filaments and everything is hushed.

Night falls like a murmur, warm as skin. The spaces between trees are all strung and drooping with paper lanterns in gold and amethyst. The glow is soft against the dormitories and the old bell tower, soft on the students sprawled in their crooked constellations of blankets and pillows in the grass. The geologists and the astronomers haze the air with chatter, voices low with exhaustion but giddy to be free of the term.

He spots the other dancers and none of them are sitting. They pace and they sway on their feet like he is now, coiled tight with excitement.

Something cold taps his arm and he blinks heavily, too tired from yesterday to waste any energy being startled. But it’s only Wonwoo, handing him a bottle of water he didn’t ask for. 

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Fine,” he considers, pausing between sips and resisting the urge to gulp it all down in the lingering heat. A cramp isn’t worth breaking his concentration. “Doesn’t hurt.” Soonyoung is off scrounging something sugary that won’t sit heavy on their stomachs, to give them energy. He’s lost sight of his pale hair under the pools of lantern light and the swarm of bodies around the smoky charcoal grills. “Just tight. Everybody's sore after practicals, you know that,” he relents when Wonwoo judges him all silent and knowing over the tops of his glasses.

“I do know.” Wonwoo steps in neatly to flank him and thumbs his scapula through his shirt. He seems to use it as a map, gliding down to probe the muscle. “Doesn’t hurt?” He lifts an eyebrow and waits.

“Maybe a little,” he allows, because even in the heat Wonwoo’s careful hand stroking over his shirt feels incredible. A bubble of nervousness forms in his chest. It's been a while since Wonwoo touched him easily. He's not like that with other people, but Chan isn't _other people._ Still, he seems fine now.

He keeps rubbing absently, mentions a book he wants to lend him. Chan thanks him even though he isn’t in the mood to read over break, would rather drowse on the roof until his dad calls him in for supper. But Wonwoo says _I have a book you’d like_ the way other people say _this song made me think of you, how are you, I love you,_

The kneading roams up to the knotted muscle lashed where his shoulders meet his neck. Wonwoo’s fingertips graze his skin while his palm is anchored against his shirt. It feels nice, better than nice. He can’t help a pleasant shiver and Wonwoo reels back with a tight, apologetic smile.

He doesn’t have time to tell him that it doesn’t hurt, or that he’s missed him these past weeks preparing for finals every waking hour, or that he feels buzzy with just a little beer, that his fingertips are too hot and he wants to press them up against Wonwoo’s mouth and learn the shape of his teeth.

Soonyoung is there, thieving the water from Chan’s hand and shoving a napkin with a few dried dates at him instead.

“You look like you just rolled out of bed,” Soonyoung greets him, but he’s flicking his thumbnail over the mouth of the bottle, a tell that he wants Wonwoo to go away so he and Chan can focus on their number.

“Would that it were so,” he sighs, scratching his throat. Formal and weird but not the exaggerated way he gets for fun. His voice always pitches a shade deeper when he’s feeling awkward, which neatly overlaps with when Soonyoung is around. “Stayed up marking for first years. I saw you guys yesterday, though,” he offers, and the edge of his smile softens into something more familiar.

Chan can tell his face is doing something embarrassing, but there’s not much he can do about that now. “You were there?”

“What did you think?” Soonyoung can’t help asking. Maybe astronomers aren’t starved for compliments, but they don’t perform their final exams for an audience muted behind safety glass.

And Wonwoo says nice things, insightful things, carefully measured. Chan can see him stacking the words in order behind his eyes before he speaks. He’s focused on the concepts, of course, but he sees Soonyoung’s impatience and talks instead about their speed and the precision of their long program. 

“You might’ve gotten a perfect score for your synchronization, but you didn’t hear it from me,” he adds, craning a glance over his shoulder for show.

Even now, he struggles to picture him and Soonyoung as partners. They don’t move like they used to dance together, not even when they’re relaxed. He can’t reconcile that negative space with the footage of their old routines he used to study. The first term after Chan transferred, he watched them conduct entire conversations not quite looking each other in the eyes.

“Will you be around later?” he asks, lungs tight, because Soonyoung has been fed his compliments and he’ll shoo Wonwoo away soon but he needs to know. He can’t put a pin in his urgency, the why of it. He isn’t ready to say goodbye until next term. 

Wonwoo smiles like he knows. “Of course.”

Maybe he does.

  
  
  


It’s half past ten and just cold enough for a sweater. The one Wonwoo forgot on a hook when Chan moved into his old room, deep forest green and soft to the touch. It falls over his hands, but he doesn’t mind. _Keep it,_ Wonwoo had said. _The room gets cold._ It used to smell like him at first, the way Chan’s pillow would smell like him when he stayed over weekends to study before the transfer, and then he wears it so much that it just smells like Chan.

“Where’s your coat?” Wonwoo frowns up at him from his table, the remote nook he likes in the top floor of the library. 

“Seriously, I’m burning up.” Chan slides carefully into place across from him. He’s still flushed from practicing with Soonyoung, his knees all quivery and unsteady like egg yolks. They were in the studio past three yesterday night, too, but Wonwoo makes (honestly, really hypocritical) disappointed grandma faces if you tell him stuff like that. 

He could study on his own, maybe. He doesn’t need Wonwoo helping him crutch through his accelerated classes so much as last year. But he’s conditioned by now. See Wonwoo, bring him a piece of fruit like the pear in his bag tonight. Study. Repeat.

When it snowed last month and the whole campus echoed white and the lake was iced over like a mirror, Wonwoo was pale and so tired he looked bruised, all from some new project he couldn’t discuss. He’d asked him if he wasn’t taking up too much of his time. Studying with Chan, proofing his papers and quizzing him before his exams, monitoring his solitary arrays with a stopwatch.

And Wonwoo considered it. He watched him consider it, because Wonwoo doesn’t entirely understand sarcasm and he can take questions gravely, at face value. He squinted out the window at the glare off the snow and then he smiled. 

_No,_ he said. _I like it when you’re around. You make me want to do better._

“Ninety minutes,” he says now, and unfolds himself just to shuffle out of his coat and drape it over Chan. It’s warm, like the sun on his back. “I’ll wake you up,” he promises. 

“Can’t believe you’re bullying me like this,” Chan mutters without a drop of conviction, already folding his arms on the table to pillow his cheek. His eyes are shut when Wonwoo reaches out and strokes his hair absently. He can’t see if he stutters over it, the flickers of hesitation he gets sometimes that remind him that Wonwoo doesn’t have any brothers or sisters of his own, no house full of cousins. He’s always a little careful, unsure. But his hand sets a hypnotic rhythm and Chan feels himself fading fast.

The blackness is deepening behind his eyes, sinking. It feels like those weekends, just a few of them to be such landmarks in his mind, when Wonwoo would stay the night and take the train back to Wonju on Sunday morning. The way they’d talk in the dark until they fell asleep, Wonwoo always sleeping on the floor because he was too polite to use the empty bed while Chan’s homesick roommate was away. Back then his crush was — stupider. Worse. He used to flop onto his side and trail his arm over the edge of the bed and hope, in a way that already feels very young in his memory, that Wonwoo would open his eyes and reach out.

“I read something that reminded me of you,” he mumbles, so tired he’s not even sure if Wonwoo can understand him. There was a popular school of thought a thousand years ago, that the sleeping mind absented itself and left the body hollow, that it returned to the particles of the air and the stars. Wonwoo likes that bit, he tells it better. “We were reading about that astronomer, Yi Xing, Tang dynasty. He said, uh. The last three king’s astronomers before him, they all died really awful. And supposedly somebody asked him why he’d try to, translate what he saw in the sky to arrays. Just to get blown up someday.

“And he said,” he struggles, a weight in his skull, tongue going heavy. “He said, ‘the stars have taken off their clothes, and like a lover I bear witness. I could not look away. I am a husband to wonder’ and, something else, I don’t know,” he sighs, pushing his face into his arms. It’s warm under his borrowed coat. 

Wonwoo’s hand is motionless, songbird light against his hair.

“That made you think of me?” he asks from far away, but Chan must have drifted off then because he can't remember if he ever answered him.

  
  
  


Once Soonyoung shakes him awake, concerned, the moon edging his face in light. Hot under his blankets, Chan blinks up and finds his eyes in the dim. 

“Were you having a nightmare?” Soonyoung tries to pat his hair and gets a thumb in his eye instead. “I could hear you.”

And Chan finds he can’t say a word, his throat squeezed, because he’s hard, on his belly, his dick rubbing into the mattress that was Wonwoo’s before him. He can’t remember how it started. What’s clear in his mind is Wonwoo stretched out under him, his straight hard shoulders and the way his waist goes small and tight under his ribs. Muffling blissed out little moans into his arm while Chan rocked into him and cracking on high needful sounds when he bottomed out. The way the pleasure of it rolled up his spine and the long muscles of his back in a wave and he gasped _Channie._

Soonyoung stares at him in the quiet until his eyes go round as coins. Then he blurts a startled sound, apologizes, and hurls himself back into his own bed to muffle his helpless cackling in his pillow.

Chan squeezes his thighs together and tries not to want.

  
  
  


May is balmy and the train from Wonju back to the city is quiet. Chan is dog tired, his head drooping whenever the conversation lulls, and finally Wonwoo sighs and tugs him to lean on his shoulder.

There is no rational reason to feel anxious meeting Chan’s family. They’re nice people, subjectivity of the term aside. Chan smiles when he talks about them. It’s only that in two years Wonwoo has done an efficient job not wondering too much what they think of them, the stranger who came to wrench Chan’s life off-course just when they thought it was settled. They must have hoped he would give up at the enormity of waiting yet another year to apply for a transfer. And like a cheap trick, a puff of smoke and a mirror in his pocket, Wonwoo had said, _now you see him, now you don’t._

The pair of them don’t look like themselves, he thinks, their reflections wavering against the window and the overcast sky. He knows Chan in his favorite close fitting track pants for casting, the ones that don’t get in his way, and he knows his sweaters never heavy enough for winter when Chan claims the afternoon sun warms him up plenty. But tonight they wear blazers, gray for him and tawny for Chan, and good shoes buffed in a hurry before they left. Chan’s shoulders are an acre and a half and somehow the curve of his cheek seems changed, sharper and more dangerous. 

At her own birthday dinner Chan’s grandmother stands to greet him, flustering Wonwoo in the middle of his bow. She moves easily, no stiffness in her knees, and Wonwoo remembers what Chan told him. That she was a dancer, too. He remembers the other thing Chan said, about exclaiming over how young she looks ( _or she’ll remember it,_ Chan had sworn at the front door) and so he does. She plucks his glasses off and tests them close to her face, then far away. 

“How does a blind boy manage to read so many books,” she marvels, and then Chan gets tired of waiting and swoops in to kiss her cheeks.

The noise over supper is astonishing, even compared to a lecture hall when the professor has stepped away. At the tables pulled together with the ease of practice are Chan’s grandmother, his parents, his two sisters and three cousins and all their significant others who Wonwoo makes the executive decision not to commit to memory. Something has to go.

“And what are you studying?” Chan’s father asks, breaking only for a mournful glance as his wife picks half of the beef from his bowl and replaces it with more cucumber. “My son talks like you have a good head on your shoulders. Something less dangerous, is it?"

Wonwoo, leaning in to hear him over the din of cross-conversation, wishes very much he could lean out again. Out a window, maybe. Chan’s mother serves him more beef as if the factor of that particular variable is the answer to all things. She whispers something in Chan’s ear and he pulls a face and doesn’t quite meet Wonwoo’s eyes across the table. “Well, sir—”

“Appa, be nice, you know he can’t talk about what he’s studying. Don’t make him lie. Do you want another beer? I’ll get you another beer. Don’t pinch me, he can have another beer, it’s Saturday. Too slow, I’m gone, you can’t catch me— she swings, she misses!”

“Maybe you can explain why you chose my grandson.” The tables go quiet and Chan pauses uncertainly in the kitchen doorway, beer hanging from his fingertips in its silver star blazed can. One day he’ll be a husband and look like this, with his soft hair and strong shoulders, coming home for dinner. The snapshot image is so tangible and alarming that Wonwoo casts it out like ash. “We are very proud of him,” she adds, warmer. But she isn’t smiling, either.

“Because it had to be someone extraordinary,” he says tightly, aware of how ridiculous he sounds. It’s only that he can’t make up some lie about calculations and the nuanced articulation in Chan’s footage. These are all true things in their way but— he’s right there, watching, and so he can’t lie. One of Chan’s sisters pats his knee surreptitiously under the table. Friendly, brisk. She doesn’t look at him and give it away. It feels like an initiation. 

He swallows. “I owed Soonyoung a better partner. It had to be him. No one else came close." 

Then Chan’s mom steals the beer he tries to pass off to his father and wonders aloud why none of them are asking the important questions, like whether Chan is dating that sweet boy Soonyoung. 

Chan’s youngest cousin chokes on an elaborate disgusted sound exclusive to teenagers. The tide of conversation swells up again around them. 

He prods his rice to one side of his bowl and thinks it was a stupid thing to wonder. If Chan’s family might get the wrong idea, meeting him.

  
  
  


After supper there’s a cake topped in strawberries and melon like moonstone. There are pictures to spy on, all over the walls. Chan in a dinosaur costume for what must have been a radical school play, grinning ear to ear, his small hands crooked into talons. Chan, younger here, sitting on his father’s shoulders, both of them dressed in red and wearing their stage makeup. He passes over a frame because he doesn’t see Chan, then hitches to a halt, his stomach turning in recognition.

He waits for the rooftop. As pretty as Chan promised it would be, deep blue shadows combed through the skyline. 

“You didn’t tell me they were your family,” he accuses when Chan pauses for a sip of his barley tea. 

Chan doesn’t feign shock or ask who he means. The twins in the photo. Beautiful women who looked so much like his mother, their hair sleek and lips red, beaming arm in arm.

“I wish you’d told me,” he adds, softer, when Chan chews his lip and says nothing. 

“Ah,” Chan bites off, eyes gone tight. He picks a splinter from the little deck where they sit. “Sorry. I didn’t want to make you sad.” 

Inside his father is playing the violin, windows thrown open to the night. He breathes in and with breath replaces all the inane things he might say, consolations that Chan doesn’t need from him. Not his little oracle, with his deep eyes and shining corn silk hair courtesy of Soonyoung. Not his impossible boy of the careful, careful hands. Like he could pluck out the snags in a person, the painful wrong stitches Wonwoo can’t even recognize, and make them whole.

“Your parents must have hated my guts,” he considers at last. “I’m sorry if I ever made things harder for you here.”

Chan shakes his head. “My aunts had to learn on the road, anywhere they could." The violin picks up again and the breeze is cool. "They know I have better teachers. Safer. They worry, but they know.”

“You do,” he agrees, and Chan rolls his eyes at him.

“I meant you.”

When the barley tea is gone he stands and tugs his jacket on again. He waits for Wonwoo.

“I wish I could talk to you about my research,” he admits. Far from the watchful mountains and the silent lake. His father doesn’t ask him about school anymore. It wounded his pride, he thinks, when he wouldn’t tell him what he was studying. Wouldn’t bend the rules and ask for his insights. He tells himself it’s his imagination, colored by sensitivity, how his father hasn’t hugged him in — well it would’ve been longer than two years, anyway. He’s not really the hugging kind. He wears one pair of shoes until they fall apart, his dad, and then he replaces them. He doesn’t like to waste his time.

“Yeah, but I know you can’t,” Chan frowns. “I don’t even read the titles on the books you check out from the library, I swear.”

“You’ll be the first person I tell, when I’m allowed,” he promises. It’s a strange, heavy thing to offer. The consequence of it sits like a stone on his tongue. 

Words of power aren’t like celestial arrays. They aren’t ancient, holding patterns of meaning for millions of years. Some languages are older than others, some new. But still somehow there are words of power, and they can’t even be forbidden because most people have never heard of them and never should. He thinks Chan might enjoy the frustrating puzzle of it all. Why these words and not others. Can they make more. What is the root. What is the mechanism.

“Really?” Chan breathes. Like he’s talking about something more worthwhile than Wonwoo ego tripping on his own theories. He has a hand raised but he doesn’t smooth Wonwoo’s lapel or pinch his ear. Poised like a mudra in the negative space between them where light can still reach. Blessing and consolation. 

He thinks Chan might kiss him then. Or else he’s the one aching for how yielding his mouth looks in the hazy light, parted and hopeful and maybe even offered up to _him._

He thinks of Soonyoung. The weight of his body in a narrow bed and how his neck tasted between his teeth. It’s unfathomable, how the feeling of a word can change. The depth of it.

“Hyung,” Chan murmurs, searching. 

“I don’t want your family to think I’m rude,” he announces, and sidesteps him on his way to the door.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> excerpt pablo neruda, trans. w.s. merwin
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)


	3. Chapter 3

The campus he calls home embraces the lake shore like a crescent moon, its halls and towers and far seeing observatory guarded by mountains low and green, all shadowed as if someone had dragged their fingers through wet clay. 

Wonwoo could navigate from his dorm room quietly, with his eyes shut, and never wake Soonyoung with a stumble. With enough patience he thinks he could hazard his way blind to the foyer, past the old oaks, and follow the paths he knows like his own cardinal directions. Here the old bell tower and its climbing ivy. Here the lawn spills gently out beyond the lion pillars to the lake and the boathouse. Here the practice rooms with their tall windows and fire spouts. He imagines the echoes off the polished floors could summon him via echolocation. 

If he followed the stones of the dormitory under his fingertips (east face, south face, west face) he could navigate to the library, where the smell of paper rises over his tongue and leaves him hungry in ways he can’t name and the rasp of turned pages under his fingertips wakes him up after hours of practice. Soonyoung will text him if he stays after midnight, sometimes. If he’s still lying awake, impatient in Wonwoo’s bed with his hand down his boxers, he might ask what Wonwoo is trying so hard to find. 

This place does not appear in his map. 

A hollow beneath the library, hushed and lungless. Old carved pillars, discolored stone. The bones of a summer palace he’d always read was razed when the empress was driven into exile. 

Wonwoo studies a skull in its stone alcove. The bone is clean, the teeth lacquered black. On the brow a character is painted that he can’t recognize. It could be Old Korean, or a form of Chinese. It’s not the sort he can sound out. Not every skull in the catacomb has an inscribed character, but no two are the same that he can see. 

This is where Professor Kwon tells him that there are words of power in the world. Words that will leap hot and alive from the tongue faster than any array can be drawn. She introduces the past scholars in their resting place and he begins to count the skulls again.

He’s weak for this sort of flattery. He knows. All his life he’s been playing teacher’s pet, just like when he stays after lecture and begs for more readings. Like he's caught in the yoke of his own gravity. _Wonwoo_ _is a bright boy,_ his teachers used to say, but it felt harder to earn every passing year. Already he wants to impress her, to learn and discover and prove she was right to entrust him with this sort of mystery. His head spins with the possibilities and he doesn’t understand what she’s asking him until she repeats herself twice. 

Her shoes are so sharp, he thinks numbly, watching the shadows of her electric lantern on the ground. Sharp toes, sharp skinny stems for heels. It’s a wonder she could pick her way down the eroded steps so easily.

“If I—” he tries, then falters. The air is heavy and still and he can’t quite remember how he’s meant to breathe. “Soonyoung won’t have a partner.” Even in the silence his voice is small. 

Professor Kwon tilts her head and considers another alcove. An array is etched into the dome of the skull cleanly, as if with acid. She’s always sharp, Soonyoung’s mother. The warm light catching in her hair and her amused eyes doesn’t soften her. She laughs as often as Soonyoung does but only for herself, privately and with no invitation to join her. Wonwoo feels not unlike a fleck of algae under a microscope, no matter that she told him he had promise and brought him here herself for proof.

“Do you believe you’re capable of impeding his future?” she asks, crisp like they’re in her lecture hall. “Your absence isn’t any more consequential than your presence. Soonyoung could cast with a broom for a partner and he would still be _better._ Bring your light here and look closely,” she gestures, her interest in his dilemma expended.

So he does.

  
  
  


There is an illusion that comes with having a partner. Some casters maintain their partnerships out of school, or beyond their apprenticeships. Rarely for their whole careers, though, unless they get married, or if they’re family like Chan’s aunts. It’s all very respectable and bloodless. It’s not _meant_ to be about the casters and it certainly isn’t about art. They’re expected to be adaptable. It might take forty casters joined to haul a collapsed bridge from the bay. Eight hundred to turn away a tsunami until the sea falls back to fretful waves and a hard grey sky.

He’s never asked Chan if he and Soonyoung have considered their plans after school. If they’ll apply for their apprenticeship together. Chan glows at Soonyoung as if they complete a single filament. He doesn’t ask. 

The pair of them with their hair pale under the lantern light are pacing the inner courtyard. Here the grass gives way to rain smooth flagstones. A better drawing surface, if not exam regulation worthy. They’re chalking out their arrays, the outer polyhedrons and key points. Their feet are bare and Chan’s ankles are fragile beneath the coiled strength of his calves. The result is simpler than a solitary array. The interior is empty. The casters will embody it.

He tries to remember it properly. The hot buzz in his teeth, holding dozens of intricate layers all in his mind. What he feels instead are Chan’s fingertips drumming against his own thighs as he rocks in place and surveys his work. He catches his lip between his teeth, and Wonwoo catches himself mirroring him where he sits. It is artificial, the bond between casting partners, and he was never to Soonyoung what Chan has been. But sometimes the phantom limb aches. To feel connected to someone within the humming web of your casting, the only time in his life he wasn't alone in his own skin. 

But he and Soonyoung fought all the time, and they’re better off where they are now.

The lanterns dim and in the dark beneath the trees the borrowed speakers hum with a shimmering swell of strings. Only first years can use their practice music during exams to help anchor their memories to the arrays. At the intermediate level they wean themselves off until they don’t even count their steps aloud. But this night is not functional and there is no practical aim. In the dark windows flanking them professors watch for safety but pretend blindness, he knows. There is no category of study for joy, for how Chan smiles even when he concentrates. At the corners, if you know where to look.

The first sequence executed is foundational. Wonwoo recognizes the seventeen points and their degrees even in the dark. He knows Soonyoung’s shadow and he knows Chan, faceless. In precision and force of will they begin igniting the unseen arrays that follow in the vessels of their bodies. They keep perfect time, always. With the music. With each other.

There’s wonder in it, he knows firsthand. Behind the eyes depthless circles of gold turning and aligning, points flaring up like stars when called upon. Still he thinks he appreciates the view here more. The first summoned light parts the air like a crack in a door and spills over Chan’s face, and the awe he feels isn’t academic at all.

The array unfolds like wings in the dark and someone near him gasps.

Mountains of light, rivers of light, rising up around them. Chan’s fingertips splay and extend in a mirror of Soonyoung’s and their legs sweep clean sure lines. Mountains fall to a calm sea and ships of many sails, a humpback whale breaching the surface and cresting an arc through the air. There is an audible slap when its mass meets the water, the sea of light erupting and splashing over the lawn into sparks that float up around them like fireflies and fade into nothing. It’s all artistry, that sort of illusion. The sound. He thinks he feels Chan’s showmanship in it.

Beyond the cage of light Chan’s eyes are faraway and intent. He’s grinning with all his teeth despite the exertion.

The waves gather themselves up into lush tall trees, climbing vines, birds with wingspans like sensible four door family cars swooping outward. He wonders, watching the rapid articulations of Chan’s body never clashing with Soonyoung, if this is how it felt to be very young and unafraid. Clinging to a curtain offstage and knowing magic like a taste on the tongue and not caring about the why or the how or the use of it.

Then there is a tiger a storey tall rubbing its flanks between the trees, so lovingly rendered that they can see the muscles bunching and shifting beneath its stripes. He means to put his fingers to his lips and whistle for Soonyoung getting his way, but his hands feel rooted. His fingertips dig into the grass.

Each step the looming tiger takes is massive. They reverberate. There couldn’t be a more perfect union than Soonyoung’s obsessive attention to detail and Chan’s elation at every challenge, always trying to outdo himself. They hum along a single wavelength, some unseen and incalculable current of energy loosed into the night.

The scene closes on cherry trees. Budding, growing, spreading until the dark is fired with a canopy of light again. The track softens from its crescendo into a sweet, lilting coda. And then they set the blossoms loose.

They float, carried across the lawn on an unseen breeze. As they touch the ground and outstretched palms the light resolves itself. Solid, fragrant. They’ll last only a few minutes, he knows. Without an active array sustaining it, any configuration of matter becomes unstable. Already their work is staggeringly advanced. Refined.

He doesn’t tally the points they should have been awarded for components or stability or their demanding grade of execution. He holds very gently in his palm a flower that Chan willed into being. He watches Chan throw a sweaty arm over Soonyoung’s shoulders as they catch their breath in the heat. Soonyoung hugs his waist and shakes him and says something in his ear. For a moment Wonwoo is seized by the urge to shove the cherry blossom past his teeth and eat it before it disappears. 

Cherry blossoms. He thinks, unbidden, that everything ever called a sign has been a force not yet understood. As sure as gravity or the meaning hung between stars. 

  
  
  


Minghao and Junhui are beginning their array in the dark as well when he slips away. Wonwoo catches their reflection in the windows of the dormitory when the light spills through the air. Pale like moonbeams on water. He pauses to watch them from over his shoulder.

They haven’t drawn a foundational array at all, he realizes. They move so close together as those silver ribbons of light spring from the trees, soaring into garlands and delicate lattices. Neither of them are wearing shirts but they have—blindfolds.

The manifestation of their casting isn’t what has the watchers breathless. No array, blindfolded. A dangerous, determined show of control for the sake of its own artistry. The monitors must be anxiously fogging up the glass inside.

They weren’t always this easy together, but then they’ve been partners more than three years now. Longer than he and Soonyoung were. Time moved on for them when Wonwoo stepped away. He isn’t anyone’s partner, now.

He doesn’t know if they’re _involved._ But they move like Taemin and Jongin used to, before they graduated, and everyone knew about the two of them. Not like they tried to hide it. It’s easy to imagine like this. The way they support each other through extensions in turn. Faultless and steady. Their hands find waists and thighs like they belong there. Junhui clasps the back of Minghao’s neck and lowers the rigid controlled line of his body only for Minghao to launch himself up from the sides of his feet like he’s oiled.

Lanterns disappear behind him and the music fades. His chest feels tight and he tips his head back to stare into the dizzy spill of stars. Jongin and Taemin used to dance like that and they used to kiss like coming up for air, or so his memory has convinced him. Just a split second he stumbled upon seared with meaning. They didn’t hear him, in the stairwell. They had their own room and he thought how hungry two people must be, that they couldn’t wait a minute longer. Taemin had threaded his hands in Jongin’s hair, he remembers, the faint shine of his silver rings against the black.

It seemed like the missing variable to an equation he had never named. Maybe that was why he and Soonyoung were always fighting even when they made top marks. Always annoyed, at ease one minute and set off the next by a word or a sigh or a glance. Both of them defensive, critical. Maybe there was a name for that tightly coiled strand of awareness between them. And if the tension were resolved, he thought eagerly when he tugged Soonyoung by the wrist and tipped up his chin to test his theory. If, then.

But that isn’t how the story goes.

His curled hand is empty. The cherry blossoms have faded back into nothingness. The campus is silent and the windows are all dark and it’s like he’s standing up on the rooftop again with the violin drifting out the window. Staring back at Chan and feeling so small.

You have to do things carefully, he thinks. Like drawing an array. There can be no accidents if you care at all about what comes next. Even people have a correct sequence if you take the time to look. He thinks Chan said that. 

  
  
  


After the performances Chan bolts through his shower feeling restless, electric. Too fast and the water runs into his eyes and irritates his contacts. He can’t stop picturing it, the way Jun and Minghao danced together. The way their hands moved over each other, laced, sprung apart. The way they were attuned without touching, too. Blind and sharing their negative space like a single electric field. It looked excruciatingly hard, not even a boundary array to ground them.

He wants to try it immediately. 

Distantly he remembers kissing Jun, like it happened to someone else. In the fall, when the trees blazed up tawny orange and rivulets of liquid gold seemed tipped down the mountains to spill into the lake. He can’t remember why it only happened twice. No, three times. Only it’s embarrassing to think of it too long. He looked good tonight, him and Minghao both with muscle shifting under their skin and their mouths all foreign and new somehow when they were wearing the blindfolds.

He wants to ask Wonwoo what he thought of it, when he jogs back out in fresh clothes, but he isn’t there.

His feet slide in his sandals and damp clings to his skin. He doesn’t see him drifting around the picked over tables of food or flying kites with luminous golden strings. Soonyoung isn’t where he left him talking to Jun and Minghao, either. Hyejin hasn’t seen him and neither has Yongsun. When he hooks Jihoon over by last of the chicken, he blinks as though he hasn’t met Chan a dozen times, as if Chan doesn’t know all of Wonwoo’s friends. He hasn’t seen him, either. 

The urgency. He can’t name it, it feels like a dream. It feels like he has to find Wonwoo this minute, drag his palm to his heart and ask if he can feel the buzzing under his skin. Ask if he imagined that moment on the roof, when he would have sworn Wonwoo had something to say to him.

In the thick of the dizzy panic like gauze in his ears muffling the sounds of crickets and music you wouldn’t cast to but you might dance with a person, if you liked them enough, he thinks there’s a short answer to this. One he doesn’t want to admit. His legs are sore beneath him and he looks up at the west dormitory and the dark window that would be lit up if Wonwoo were there, or if he had any reason to stay up. 

He’s looking for Wonwoo, but Wonwoo isn’t looking for him. There’s no _reason_ Wonwoo should be looking for him. If he had a reason, he would have told him on the roof. If he texted him and Wonwoo had his phone turned on for once, what would he say. _Where are you,_ but why. _I need to see you,_ but why. 

Chan is the one making a fool of himself. Holding a white hot ember somewhere under his ribs because Wonwoo said _you make me want to do better._

What do I have to do to make it easy, he wonders. It used to be easy kissing Hansol, hungry and curious. They would laugh after, all out of breath. And if he lets himself remember, it was easy kissing Jun with his big warm hands that fastened tight over his hips. Jun who never asked him questions he couldn’t answer like _who are you thinking about._

The great lawn rolls softly out to the lake and he falters in his step. Awful, idiot hope grows wings in his chest. 

The boathouse is like a dream, the exterior carved in wooden arches of vines and blooming things. In the warmer months he meets Wonwoo sometimes under the porch, the sun like hot honey on the skin or at night when the crickets are so loud the air shakes. Wonwoo is more prone to distraction here. To setting aside his books and slowly peeling the apple Chan has brought him, mulling aloud some theory Chan might be learning. The mechanics of it, the way he always makes the most complicated things sound simple. Wonwoo thinks he’s pretentious and he’s not wrong but he doesn’t waste his words just to sound smarter. He likes clean explanations.

The porch is empty but light glimmers at the round windows on the ground floor, where the water laps into berths. There’s no one on the lake this time of night, no tests to be conducted. The door opens without resistance for the press of his hand.

Wonwoo isn’t there.

“You want to get the door?” Minghao asks, strained. His hands are up Soonyoung’s shirt. None of them came up to shower, they must smell ripe but all he catches on the air is something burnt and herbal. Jun’s eyes are glassy dark and his mouth is swollen.

“Hey,” Soonyoung yelps and tries to smooth down his hair. His chest is heaving and his shorts are distended. They’re all wearing garlands of white flowers too perfect to be real. Even now the petals are disintegrating and falling back into sparks. Maybe Jun and Minghao liked the manifestation enough to ask Soonyoung to show them up close, he thinks in distant hysteria.

The door. Chan steps back and knocks it shut with his heel. Only afterward does it occur to him that he was probably meant to be standing on the other side of it. 

“You have beds,” he can’t help observing. “Three of them, actually.” Comic, that’s how it feels, like he’s reciting his line in a play. Cockus blockus enters stage left. He wonders now how many times he politely ignored someone jerking off on the other side of the wall but they were really—

“It’s _hot_ in there,” Soonyoung complains. He sounds more like himself even if he’s trying to tug the hem of his shirt over his lap.

“Sorry,” he answers, like he caused the weather. 

“Don’t be sorry,” Jun says at the same time Minghao asks “Are you staying or are you going?”

They regard each other over Soonyoung’s shoulder like cats. He’s still caught between the two of them, poised over Jun’s thighs. Jun blinks slowly, then smiles and bends to kiss the crook of Minghao’s neck as if that resolves everything. Minghao is sharpening his stare and it’s already more attention than he’s ever paid Chan at one time.

“No, of course he’s not,” Soonyoung squirms. He’s pink all over but he cranes away from the wet meeting of tongues and eyes Chan seriously. “Are you okay? I thought you’d be using the room.”

He thinks, in his own defense, that there are about three more erections in this conversation than he can handle right now. “You said that before.”

Soonyoung pries the others from their kiss, hands under their jaws. Their chins are wet. “Stop trying to kill him, he can’t even think. Why aren’t you busy, where’s Wonwoo?”

A strangled little noise escapes his throat. “How should I know? I thought he might be here. Is this just a thing you guys do?”

“You leave me plenty of time for it,” Soonyoung snaps, slapping a hand away from his waist. The last of the white flowers tips from his shoulder and dissolves. “Maybe you’ll even talk to me someday and I won’t have to pretend to be blind.”

“Is he staying?” Minghao asks again. If Chan didn’t know better he’d think he sounded invested in the answer.

“Too much,” Jun says softly. That’s about the same wistful tug of his mouth as when they’d stop kissing for the night. He was always the one to stop, if Chan thinks on it. 

“You think, me and Wonwoo,” he realizes, all the tangled lines flaring with meaning at last. “Jun didn’t tell you.”

“Not mine to tell,” Jun agrees, wry and absent any apology. “I’d ask you to come over here if I thought you would. Hao wants to know how you taste,” he adds, like there’s any possible response to that but sputtering white noise. Jun has nice hands, he thinks again, edged in hysteria. He wonders how he ever managed not to think of that every hour of every day since he kissed the rain from his palm last September.

“Stop trying to break my partner—”

“Maybe he wants to watch,” Minghao interrupts. Low, how has he never noticed how low his voice can sound. He tries not to think of Wonwoo over his shoulder, murmuring along with his stopwatch. Then the offer registers and he opens his mouth and makes no sound. 

Encouraging, Minghao scrapes his nails up Soonyoung’s side. "Do you?" His shirt hitches up after him, following the welts up his ribs. “Do you want to watch Jun fuck him?” Soonyoung’s jaw drops in outrage but he shivers all over. 

Jun bites the inside of his cheek and doesn’t argue. He tips his eyes downward. Unbidden, Chan thinks he knows this one. How hard it is to look at something you want when you don’t think it’s yours.

Sometimes in his casting there's a pang of certainty, like chasing a tolling bell past bands of gold. A kind of knowing so visceral he can never put it into words again, after. A bit like this. Wonwoo isn't the one frantic at the thought of leaving for a few weeks without some kind of — answer. His chest isn't clenching with the need to see his face before he goes and he isn't dreaming about him, either. And if Chan touches someone else. It doesn't matter. 

Jun murmurs something soft. Minghao clasps his forearm and lingers there.

“Maybe someday,” Soonyoung manages, strangled. He reaches down between Minghao’s thighs and squeezes so hard he grunts and sits up straighter. “Go, I’ll meet you guys inside.” He kisses the tip of his nose, as if to take the sting out, and Minghao’s face shuffles through a whole value pack of reactions before settling on fond.

They unfold themselves and tug on their shirts, murmuring things to each other he can’t catch. He doesn’t know if they’re speaking Mandarin or if he just can’t understand words and phrases when Jun is reaching into his shorts to adjust his dick like that. 

He realizes he’s blocking them and shuffles out of their way at the door. Still they pause and flank him.

“You were beautiful tonight,” Jun says earnestly.

“Thanks, we worked really hard on it,” Chan begins, grateful to fall back on rote phrases as an alternative to being turned on and panicked and miserable in equal measure. “Soonyoung had great ideas about how to utilize—”

“He was talking to _you,_ ” Minghao sighs.

Jun bends and kisses his cheek. Before he follows him out into the night, Minghao thumbs the same warm place on his skin and looks resigned. 

“Sit down and tell me something,” Soonyoung says once they’re alone. 

  
  
  


There’s a tight squeezed feeling in his ears, like coming up from underwater, or from the sunless catacomb with Professor Kwon. In the stretch of darkness away from the lanterns leading down to the boathouse. Here a light at the door, just like Junhui said there might be when he stopped him on the stairs. 

There’s a clinging smell he recognizes. It comes from purple smoke, the sort you get when you want to have a long night with someone. It’s not allowed on campus any more than the beer. Commonly lit up outside bars. In stairwells, too, but he didn’t know what it was back then. He doesn’t know anything, clearly. He wonders when Soonyoung kissed Chan for the first time. If he looked as beautiful as he does right now. 

“I came with your book,” he says in a stricken rush. The lamp light is soft and he knows firsthand what Soonyoung looks like after— “You weren’t in your room. Somebody said you’d be, here.” Fact. Fact. Chan is flushed and tense. “I can go,” he offers, but his feet have grown roots. 

“You’re so stupid they’re going to devote a new branch of science to studying you,” Soonyoung tells him. Pauses with a hand on the door. Wonwoo wants to say, vicious and resentful, at least I know enough to lock up when I want to be alone with a boy. “Hao and Junnie are going to fuck my brains out now,” he adds thoughtfully, like he’s come across an interesting headline. “Give him one good reason not to come with me.”

The water sloshes gently up against the boats in their berths. Chan rises. Barefoot again. He watches the flex of tendons under his skin as he comes closer and he can’t remember how to breathe. 

“Do you care?” Chan’s voice is thick. He’s trying to smile through it but the corners of his mouth don’t obey him. 

_Yes._ For once he doesn’t delude himself. “I do.”

“Because of Soonyoung?”

A stone lodges in his throat. “He told you.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Chan says flatly. There's a tremor in his hands “I used to wonder if you two were like that. Because it was so hard for you to act normal with each other. Are you in love with him?”

“No.” Confusion spins his skull from the inside. “Are you?”

Chan chokes off an aborted laugh. “Play a game with me, will you? I’ll blindfold you, we’ll go outside and spin you around until you’re dizzy, then you throw a rock. If you hit a single person who doesn’t know how I feel about you, I’ll give you a million won, do you like your odds?”

“If you weren’t Soonyoung’s partner I’d kill anyone who touched you,” he spits, heat crawling up his throat. It’s wild nonsense and he can’t seem to put the right words in order but Chan is close enough to touch and his eyes are stunned wide. 

"Oh." Chan reaches up and presses the pad of his thumb to his lip. He doesn’t try to talk past him.

“We’ve been partners now longer than you were, have you done that math yet? Could you stop treating me like a charity case, if that’s what this is.” Something shakes his voice. “You messed around with somebody a long time ago and he doesn’t care anymore, he thought we were _together,_ and if you tell me you’re going to ruin something for him—” 

“I can’t,” he struggles to say, and Chan shoves his thumb between his teeth like a bit.

“The last time you _ruined_ something for him, he got me for a partner.” Chan seems to study the flats of his teeth like an array in his textbook but his eyes go dim. “I thought I was getting better. I thought you were proud of me.”

He has to tug his hand free to talk. Chan’s pulse is rabbiting under his fingers. “I’m always proud of you,” he manages. His chest is cracking wide open but he recites from memory, lulled by meter. Chan’s fingers curl over his thumb as he listens.

“What was that?”

“Spanish.” His grin feels wobbly and not quite fastened on like a dangling pane of glass.

“Thanks,” Chan says acidly. “I don’t speak Spanish.” But he tugs Wonwoo’s hand closer inch by unresisting inch until it’s tucked against his sternum. His heartbeat drums here, too. 

“It’s in your book.” He unfurls his hand and his fingertips find the notch of Chan’s collar. The skin of his throat is so soft he wants to cry. “It’s poetry.” He could tug it from under his other arm to show him, the book, but that would require moving his hand and he'd cut it off first.

“You wanted to give me poetry?” It’s such a small thing, for Chan to look at him all starry eyed like that. He wants to say, I read so much poetry for my research and sometimes it comes at me like this without any warning, how much I want you. Centuries are too small for the enormity of what you are to me.

“It made me think of you,” he swallows. “That’s how it works. Beautiful things remind me of you.”

Chan kisses his palm hard as if setting a seal. “I can’t stand you,” he mutters, voice raw and wet, then rises up on his toes and repeats himself. The words, and then the action. “I felt like a crazy person waiting for you when you never asked me to,” he exhales all in a rush. Wonwoo’s lips are still buzzing. His hands are warm on his waist, under his shirt, and he didn’t even notice them. His glasses bump between them when he leans down to kiss him again. 

“I introduced you to my parents,” Chan is complaining, somehow, when they come up for air. 

“Soonyoung has met your parents,” he fires back without heat. He bites the curve of his neck just to hear what sound he’ll make. And that sound opens up a silver flare of heat in his gut, so he does it again.

“Because he’s my partner,” Chan snaps, fingertips spasming against his ribs. His eyes are red. “I wanted you to meet my parents because it’s _you.”_

Of their own accord his hands stroke over his shoulders, sweeping up his arms and the muscles of his back. “I can never put the steps in the right order with you." He sounds hoarse as a stranger to his own ears. “I don’t know where to start.”

“If you start crying,” Chan begins, but he loses his threat in the press of their mouths. Not so clumsy now, the kiss goes sweet and lasts forever. Where are your permeable boundaries, he wonders, and where are mine. Somewhere far away the book hits the floor. Chan surges up against him and his thoughts ripple into nothing. Warm, hard, soft. Lips on his neck and palms up his back and a thumb stroking his nipple until he jerks and Chan gasps delightedly against his mouth. The way they rock together through their clothes he thinks they could fall apart, just like this. 

If all the stars crashed and collided and every map of the sky lost its meaning, he thinks, Chan would still be here. Somehow. A fixed constant beyond light and time. He tries to say as much, in words that will actually make sense, but then Chan is the one who looks as though he might cry so he kisses him instead. His arms are so tight around his waist he feels crushed into a new shape. 

He stands him up against the wall like a monument and drops to his knees. Kisses his stomach, nuzzles his ribs. His shirt keeps falling in the way until Chan sucks in a shaky breath and pulls it behind his head. Like this morning when he burned the eyes, leaning out the window. His pendants shine silver against his skin.

“I never,” Chan says at the back of his mouth, and Wonwoo closes his eyes. He breathes against the heat of his skin. “I wanted it to be you,” he adds, unsteady. “I want to do this for you, I think about you all the time,” and Wonwoo yanks his shorts down and bites his hip to stifle a shout. 

He strokes his thighs at first instead of his cock and watches him leak over himself. “Aren’t you just pretty everywhere,” he mumbles indignantly, and Chan grips his shoulders harder. He can smell him on the air. He's shaking so hard. They both are. “Did you smoke with them? You’ll last longer if you did.” How clear he sounds, how reasonable, like he isn’t drooling on himself.

“No? I wasn’t going to really— I wasn’t,” he stutters. “I came here looking for you.”

He thumbs the crests of his hips in apology. “Next time I’ll be there.”

He pins Chan’s dick up against his belly with one splayed hand and kisses the tip, his slit where he tastes most of himself, until a lightness takes Chan in the knees and he begins to sway off balance. Every cracked needful sound he makes completes the circuit, skin to skin, and banks heat under his ribs. Chan hides nothing, he curses and pants and whimpers in the back of his throat when Wonwoo does something with his tongue that he's never felt before. He thunks his head back against the wall but seems to catch himself every time. Their eyes meet and Chan calls him things no one should, because he's bony and awkward and unsure. Steadier than he feels, he hooks an arm beneath Chan’s thigh. His glasses keep slipping down his nose until he tosses them off with undue force, Chan laughing in disbelief and carding a hand through his hair.

“Next time,” he repeats, more for himself. “I want to touch you everywhere.”

Chan quakes in his hold. Bites his lip and composes himself with purpose. “And I want to fuck you ‘til you cry. I'm a quick study.” He tugs his hair meaningfully, breathy and flushed as his entire body bows towards Wonwoo. He feels like he’s been run through a blender and put back together again. He squeezes Chan’s cock harder than he intends and he keens. “ _Ah_ , you’re the worst, when are you going to let me take care of you?”

“You do.” He stills and covers Chan with his hand. Even with his edges blurred he’s the most extraordinary thing he’s ever witnessed. He’s so strong, now, to still hold the world so gently. “You— you’re my key point. Everything that matters comes after you. It matters _because_ of you.” 

Near the end, when Chan has scratched welts up his neck and fucked into his throat, hissed and apologized and done it again. He thinks, tasting him before he comes, that there is an edge of power in this. Like the shape of a forbidden word on his tongue. Making room for Chan in his body, letting his ears ring and his jaw ache and his vision go spotty. If he could dissolve into a moment and only be of use. That unnoticed and necessary air that inhabits his lungs. There is something vast in it, the glimmer of epiphany, but then Chan is coming down his throat and he chokes and learns how to breathe again.

  
  
  


The horizon lightens and gilds the bellies of the clouds. The shore is still black. Soon the wards on the pillars will be renewed, but not yet. 

He swims as softly as he can, like parting the water silently is its own kind of magic. Like this, bobbing up to Wonwoo again and kissing the water that beads at his shoulder. Wonwoo’s hand finds the dip of his spine. He could get used to this, skin to skin with just the water gliding between them. He wants to say, _if I had to wait out the last two years all over again, all the work, I would. I’d start from the beginning just to get to you._

“What did you say last night?” he asks instead.

Wonwoo tugs the shell of his ear between his teeth. He bites; Chan is learning this. His thighs are going to be purple. 

“Would you like to narrow your search?” Wonwoo murmurs. “Volumes alone on how your ass has ruined my life.”

He loses so much time kissing him, his mouth hot where the water is cool, that the sky is shaded paler when he remembers himself. “The Spanish bit.”

“Your book has side by side translations,” he snarks, then stutters when Chan licks a stripe up his neck. This is the gravitational shift that comes when all the steps resolve themselves into meaning. He feels it just here, in his gut. 

“I want to hear it from you.” 

He slips out of his hold and beneath the surface. Waits there a beat. Rises again, sleeking the water back from his dark hair. He seems shy again all at once, his face in darkness but the line of his shoulders tight. Like he didn’t suck Chan off twice behind an unlocked door and press a finger inside him and call him beautiful. Variations on the last bit, especially.

“Your flowers,” Wonwoo begins. He sighs, and reaches up his long hands to cradle the base of his skull, where astronomers once believed the remnants of stardust would reside. 

“Every day you play with the light of the universe.” He kisses one temple, and the other. “Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.” Their brows rest together. “I go so far as to think that you own the universe,” he breaks off, shaky, and allows Chan to cradle his throat and feel the buzz of the words under his skin.

He whispers, laughing at himself, the shine of his smile catching like a secret in the dawn, “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another excerpt from pablo neruda, trans. w.s. merwin (xiv. every day you play from _twenty love poems and a song of despair_ ). wonwoo also obliquely references "i would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only/i would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary" from the poem variations on the word sleep by margaret atwood
> 
> this story feels like it wanted to be bigger, many times over. but i got to dabble in a corner of this universe, and i do hope you enjoy it as well <3  
> 
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
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